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Exchange Server 2013 Preview – Under the Hood – Part 1

Being a huge fan of PowerShell and the capabilities it gives those who administer, setup, monitor, troubleshoot, etc Exchange servers I thought I would unveil some of the new stuff that Microsoft has added under the hood in Exchange Server 2013 Preview. As this version of Exchange is a Preview, it could change when it releases.

There are quote a few changes under the hood for Exchange 2013 Preview. These can be revealed with various PowerShell commands.

** For comparison I am using an Exchange Server 2010 SP2 server in a Windows 2008 R2 domain and an Exchange Server 2013 Preview server in a Windows 2008 R2 domain.

For example, here is a list of new attributes for Exchange Server 2013 ‘get-mailbox’ and there is very little information out there on these attributes:

AdminDisplayVersion

ArchiveRelease

ArchiveState

CalendarLoggingQuota

“The CalendarLoggingQuota parameter specifies the quota in the Recoverable Items folder that will be used to store logs generated when changes are made to a calendar item. When the mailbox exceeds this quota, calendar logging will be disabled until the Message Record Management feature removes older calendar logs to free up more space. The default quota size is 6 GB.”

DefaultPublicFolderMailbox

“The DefaultPublicFolderMailbox parameter specifies that this mailbox will be configured as the hierarchy public folder mailbox.”

IncludeInGarbageCollection

InPlaceHolds

IsRootPublicFolderMailbox

IsSoftDeletedByDisable

IsSoftDeletedByRemove

MailboxRelease

MicrosoftOnlineServicesID

“The MicrosoftOnlineServicesID parameter specifies the user ID for the object. This parameter only applies to objects in the cloud-based service. It isn’t available for on-premises deployments.”

ObjectState

QueryBaseDN

“The QueryBaseDN parameter specifies the distinguished name for an Active Directory subtree as the value of the msExchQueryBaseDN property for the specified mailbox. This property is used by different messaging features. In Outlook Web App, a user can search for mail-enabled objects within the subtree defined by the QueryBaseDN property. For example, a value of “Users” allows the user to search the Users organizational unit. A value of “DC=contoso,DC=com” allows the user to search the entire contoso.com organization.”

ResetPasswordOnNextLogon

“If the ResetPasswordOnNextLogon parameter is set to $true, it requires users to change their password the next time they sign in to their mailbox. Valid input for this parameter is $true or $false.”

“The IsExcludedFromInitialProvisioning parameter specifies that this database is temporarily not considered by the mailbox provisioning load balancer. If the IsExcludedFromInitialProvisioning parameter is enabled, new mailboxes aren’t added automatically to this database.

IsExcludedFromProvisioningBySpaceMonitoring

ObjectState

WorkerProcessId

Lastly, if we look at get-mailboxserver, we see that Microsoft is intent on adding even more information to help Exchange Administrators:

CalendarRepairMode

“The CalendarRepairMode parameter specifies that the mode that the Calendar Repair Assistant will run in.”

DatabaseCopyActivationDisabledAndMoveNow

DataPath

DirectoryProcessorWorkCycle

DirectoryProcessorWorkCycleCheckpoint

FaultZone

InferenceDataCollectionWorkCycle

InferenceDataCollectionWorkCycleCheckpoint

InferenceTrainingWorkCycle

“PARAMVALUE: EnhancedTimeSpan”

InferenceTrainingWorkCycleCheckpoint

“PARAMVALUE: EnhancedTimeSpan”

OABGeneratorWorkCycle

OABGeneratorWorkCycleCheckpoint

ObjectState

OrgContactsSyncWorkCycle

OrgContactsSyncWorkCycleCheckpoint

PeopleRelevanceWorkCycle

“PARAMVALUE: EnhancedTimeSpan”

PeopleRelevanceWorkCycleCheckpoint

“PARAMVALUE: EnhancedTimeSpan”

PublicFolderWorkCycle

“The parameter is used by the public folder assistant to determine how often the mailboxes in a database are processed by the assistant.”

PublicFolderWorkCycleCheckpoint

“The PublicFolderWorkCycleCheckpoint determines how often the mailbox list for a database is evaluated. The processing speed is also calculated.”

WorkloadManagementPolicy

Values removed (or missing for now)

CalendarRepairSchedule

GroupMetricsGenerationTime

IrmLogEnabled

IrmLogMaxAge

IrmLogMaxDirectorySize

IrmLogMaxFileSize

IrmLogPath

As you can see Microsoft has added some new properties to Exchange Server 2013 Preview mailboxes. As for the removed attributes, as most relate to IRM (Information Rights Management), I would assume that this information has been moved as IRM commands still exist in 2013: